Wednesday, 20 July 2016

New Members' Survey

Following my article on ConHome regarding our influx of new members, I have been contacted by several Associations enquiring about the mechanics of how we conducted this research, and the questions we asked. As always, happy to share. In West Kent we use two online tools:(a) MailChimp: there is a limited free to use service or an enhanced service with payment. We pay to use the professional service as we manage multiple mailing lists, and we benefit from the increased analytics which are not available on the free service. MailChimp allows users to upload and maintain databases and send personalised mailings to specific target groups. (b) Survey Monkey: again, there is a free and a paid-for service. We use their free service as we have found this meets our needs, though there is a lot of advertising which can sometimes put people off or cause confusion. To survey our new members we simply uploaded the membership list, ensuring the respondents first name and email address were in different columns. We then sent each a personalised email with a link to the online survey. Here is a copy of the email. As always, I am happy for other Associations to copy and use anything they like:

Please note that we put the link to complete the survey at the top and bottom of the letter. Many people do not read to the end of an email, so if the link is only at the end of the letter it is often overlooked or never reached. By placing an invitation at the top of the page, even those who have no time or patience to read the whole letter have an option to click and participate. And here is a copy of the survey CLICK HEREPlease feel free to click the link and copy any of our questions, but please refrain from completing the survey as this will simply corrupt the quality of the data.